A Susan Calvin?studies show a 100% of females are someone’s daughter. Also, welcome to writing from the 1940’s and 50’s. What were you expecting?
News Foundation Adaptation Series Officially Ordered by Apple
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A Susan Calvin?
Susan Calvin fit right into period gender stereotypes -- the assumption that some women could fulfill traditionally male roles, but only if they were unfeminine, unattractive, and emotionally and sexually frigid, otherwise they would've surely gotten married and had kids already.
I read the books back in junior high and high school, but I don't remember a thing from them other than Hari Sheldon and a few concepts.
Honestly, after watching the trailer, I couldn't care less about the adaptation. Just not interested.
Honestly, after watching the trailer, I couldn't care less about the adaptation. Just not interested.
I wouldn't consider "girlfriend of...," "wife of...," or "daughter of..." to be the defining characteristics of Bayta Darrell. At worst, she's part of an ensemble group of characters in "The Mule," one of whom happens to be her boyfriend/husband (and who's such a non-entity I can't recall his name), who emerges clearly as the protagonist at the end when she murders Ebling Mis. (The use of the word "murder" is delibrate; at best, it's justifiable homicide.)
Her granddaughter Arkady is a strange case, because she's set up at the protagonist of "...And Now You Don't"/"Search by the Foundation," but she doesn't do anything. Everything she does is at the whim of other characters. I remember her most because of the Michael Whelan cover, but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you anything she actually does except to unwittingly mislead her father as to the location of the Second Foundation.
Foundation is a weird series when it comes to clear protagonists. Weirdly, I think of The Mule as the tragic hero of the Trilogy, but that's purely in retrospect knowing what Hari Seldon created with the Second Foundation, as in attempting to destroy the Foundations and the Plan the Mule is actively trying to destroy the psychohistorical tyranny the Second Foundation will impose on humanity.
And it looks quite... dark? I honestly didn't expect it to go that dark. Even with some of the themes in the books, I always felt they were optimistic rather than dark, well other than the part with The Mule. But this seems to go the dark route accompanied with foreboding music. Definitely not what I expected. I'm not quite sure what to think yet.
Huh and I was already kind of slightly rooting for him just becuase he had a sympathetic backstory, The Foundation was going around turning people into vassals in some frankly messed up ways, and The Foundation was kind of coming off as a bit of a boring invincible "hero" by the end of The General.
Absolutely nothing. Probably 50% of the original book male characters will have their gender reversed for the tv show (or they will be "non-binary" or similar).
Oh, definitely. I’ve already made my peace with that and can’t wait to watch.
Absolutely nothing
I don't see an issue with making changes because most of the characters were paper thin to begin with.
It's funny that you bring up "The General"/"The Big and the Little" -- I think Bel Riose, as briefly as he appears, is one of the most compelling characters in the saga. He's fighting the weight of history itself. There's something noble, if futile, in that.
The Second Foundation, as a concept (or a gestalt character), is something that even when I was twelve and reading the trilogy for the first time I wasn't sure how I was supposed to take. Are we supposed to root for them when the Mule goes to Tazenda? Do they have noble motives and the Foundation's best interests at heart? Are they benevolent guardians of the Seldon Plan or are they taking advantage of the Seldon Plan? Asimov himself seems ambivalent about them, perhaps because he'd tired of the setting and "The Mule" was intending as an ending. The ending of Second Foundation does seem to set them up as the behind-the-scenes antagonist for the Foundation eventually (the Foundation does the hard work of building the Second Empire, and the Second Foundation will leap in and become the new Empire's aristocracy), Foundation's Edge takes this further, and David Brin subtly hints at who wins the coming inter-Foundation conflict in Foundation's Triumph.
Truth. The number of memorable characters in the Trilogy can be numbered on a single hand, and one of them is a hologram.
Sorry, I exaggerate, but not by a whole lot.
I have no problem with gender-bending and race-bending the characters of Foundation.
Is it even race-bending? Did Asimov ever specifically describe his characters' skin color or ethnicity? It's so far in the future that names have changed and Earthly nationalities are forgotten. Humans would probably have developed whole new ethnic groups aligned with planet of origin, as prior generations of colonists on any one planet would've interbred and the populations of different planets would've diverged due to genetic drift over tens of millennia. So the characters would be no more likely to appear "white" to us than to appear as any other Earthly ethnicity.
(Cover art doesn't count -- lots of book covers depict the characters in ways that don't match their descriptions in the text, different artists can render the same character very differently, and there are numerous cases of nonwhite characters being mistakenly or deliberately whitewashed by cover artists.)
Although the name "Hari" makes me inclined to imagine Seldon as South Asian. I was hoping for Ben Kingsley to get the part.
Asimov doesn't specify race, but given that the stories were bought by John W. Campbell it's a safe assumption, in my view, that the characters were intended as white and of northern European extraction.
Of course that was the implicit assumption at the time, but if it doesn't actually say so in the text, then it's not contradicting anything to cast them differently. It's not race-bending in the strictest sense, just exploiting an ambiguity.
Just for the sake of completeness, in Prelude to Foundation there are depicted various ethnic groups on Trantor.
that’s basically what I was trying to say. They will use the Demerzel character as female and Daneel is not even mentioned. I suspect the focus will be on the fall of galactic empire and Seldon’s plan, and they will avoid the Robot and Zeroth Law stuff, so no need for Daneel.
I've never been a farmer, but I don't think that's how it works...
That's exactly why I always thought the Masterpiece Theater approach would be best.
The only time I remember him mentioning skin color in any of the later books was to make the point that nobody noticed such trivia anymore. I think it was the same part where he used the term "supernaturalist" to make the point that religion was also mostly unknown by then. Not a bad future, after all.
In Gregory Benford's Foundation's Fear, I recall some references to humans with green skin. That's such a weird book.
